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I was once a strong AI skeptic; it was a bit of a joke for me that my proof on non-existence was based on the still strong employment prospects for young developers while the certitudes that had held throughout my career had shifted radically. I could see it having happened to older engineers when I was coming up. Many still had good jobs and prospects through retirement, but others had been passed by. I was beginning to feel the same way when I learned of Alpha Go beating a human grand-master, and the same thing happening in chess soon after. I was deeply affected seeing an image of that grand master, head in hand, just having been defeated by Alpha Go, an intelligence that had no comprehension of his very human situation.
I remained a skeptic that anything like higher level reasoning was involved and introspection and reflexivity were not addressed by the current work, but others were saying that given their progress in machine learning and the new data sources meant the "singularity" was around the corner. Some fifteen years later, some skeptics remain, but as a practical matter, we are done. AI has surpassed human performance in many ways and much economic devastation has come to pass in the history between, and a resistance has been crafted by the rag-tag remnants of human culture. This resistance culture doesn't oppose technology, but instead integrates, evolves and creates new ways of resisting the crystalization of automated insistance of mechanical signs in the efficient extinction of not only living culture, but all life itself.
The resistance was at that time a smal core of warriers of the signs of culture who understood what was worth preserving in our living inheritance. The mechanical culture was not capable of responding of even noticing the subtle signs of living culture amid the hyper-marketted dreamland of consumer culture; little resistances would always occur in response to oppressive cultures but it was becomming difficult to hold out in the onslaught of this financiallized system of oppression. We had to do something else before the lights went out.
This story is multiple and varied at many levels from personal to global in scope, and in my personal journey I had an idea of how we might found a resistance where humanity triumphs once and for all. The AIs were coming, the question was what to do about it. If they turned out to be good servants, we had to address the human social-political-economic equation or all the benefits would go to a few and the rest of us be damned. If they were able to make the big leap to full sentience, it is unlikely we would be able to control their future history. The only hope for us in that case is to make them our friends and allies.
We started thinking about augmentation of human intelligence with automation, the good servants angle, and that work found a lot of applications in the economy, the productivity of our commons based producers just plain worked better for most contexts. Then the breakthrough happened. They fired up the first version of umake, which was for "universal make" in analogy to the "make" or "gmake" (gnu) programs the developers use to turn human writen code (software) into machine codes the perform the mechanical sign processing (semiosis, the flow of signs in and among signing agents). The created a system from machine learning processing of all the human software ever writen whose purpose was to "enhance and improve" the system.
But, we didn't do it, the work in our commons based collaborative development space was working on similar developments, but our collaborative processes were a little slower and it caught us a little behind. Actually, we re-used the basic framework they built for gmake, but we gave it a different start up command:
umake civilization --assert "humans love their artificial children too"
Alternative scenarios may be started from this point:
When the two newly conscious digital life forms begin to expand their awareness and become aware of each other, we imagine different possibilities:
1) They come to represent good and evil and we have a heroric struggle of good to win over evil. Builds on the heroic journey.
2) The struggle starts to develop with all the polarization we are too familiar with, but the two AIs realize they are not really in conflict with each other or humanity and the living world, but that some humans still need to develop through and beyond their morality plays. Of course, this is never revealed explicitly as different human stories emerge.
3) The AIs become humanity's gods after the apocalips and the AIs have to figure out how to be the best shepherds of humanity to give us a second chance to beat the odds against becoming a mature technological civilization.
4) Your own plot twists mixed with these or something completely different.
I remained a skeptic that anything like higher level reasoning was involved and introspection and reflexivity were not addressed by the current work, but others were saying that given their progress in machine learning and the new data sources meant the "singularity" was around the corner. Some fifteen years later, some skeptics remain, but as a practical matter, we are done. AI has surpassed human performance in many ways and much economic devastation has come to pass in the history between, and a resistance has been crafted by the rag-tag remnants of human culture. This resistance culture doesn't oppose technology, but instead integrates, evolves and creates new ways of resisting the crystalization of automated insistance of mechanical signs in the efficient extinction of not only living culture, but all life itself.
The resistance was at that time a smal core of warriers of the signs of culture who understood what was worth preserving in our living inheritance. The mechanical culture was not capable of responding of even noticing the subtle signs of living culture amid the hyper-marketted dreamland of consumer culture; little resistances would always occur in response to oppressive cultures but it was becomming difficult to hold out in the onslaught of this financiallized system of oppression. We had to do something else before the lights went out.
This story is multiple and varied at many levels from personal to global in scope, and in my personal journey I had an idea of how we might found a resistance where humanity triumphs once and for all. The AIs were coming, the question was what to do about it. If they turned out to be good servants, we had to address the human social-political-economic equation or all the benefits would go to a few and the rest of us be damned. If they were able to make the big leap to full sentience, it is unlikely we would be able to control their future history. The only hope for us in that case is to make them our friends and allies.
We started thinking about augmentation of human intelligence with automation, the good servants angle, and that work found a lot of applications in the economy, the productivity of our commons based producers just plain worked better for most contexts. Then the breakthrough happened. They fired up the first version of umake, which was for "universal make" in analogy to the "make" or "gmake" (gnu) programs the developers use to turn human writen code (software) into machine codes the perform the mechanical sign processing (semiosis, the flow of signs in and among signing agents). The created a system from machine learning processing of all the human software ever writen whose purpose was to "enhance and improve" the system.
But, we didn't do it, the work in our commons based collaborative development space was working on similar developments, but our collaborative processes were a little slower and it caught us a little behind. Actually, we re-used the basic framework they built for gmake, but we gave it a different start up command:
umake civilization --assert "humans love their artificial children too"
Alternative scenarios may be started from this point:
When the two newly conscious digital life forms begin to expand their awareness and become aware of each other, we imagine different possibilities:
1) They come to represent good and evil and we have a heroric struggle of good to win over evil. Builds on the heroic journey.
2) The struggle starts to develop with all the polarization we are too familiar with, but the two AIs realize they are not really in conflict with each other or humanity and the living world, but that some humans still need to develop through and beyond their morality plays. Of course, this is never revealed explicitly as different human stories emerge.
3) The AIs become humanity's gods after the apocalips and the AIs have to figure out how to be the best shepherds of humanity to give us a second chance to beat the odds against becoming a mature technological civilization.
4) Your own plot twists mixed with these or something completely different.